So. I was having a conversation with myself, the way I do, and I wanted to make a point about the generational shift in our concepts of race and politics, and I told myself this: If the sentence Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a communist agent makes any sense to you, then you were probably born before—what—1955? At any rate, people who are fifty years old or younger, now, presumably grew up with MLK as a national hero, or at any rate as an establishment figure in race relations. People who are sixty or older presumably had conversations about whether he was a communist agent. Oh, Gentle Readers (who are all, I think, under fifty, yes? Happy to be wrong, as usual) are knowledgeable enough to be aware that he was accused of being a communist, but that’s different, that’s history.
John McCain was born in 1936; he was nineteen or so when the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to the public eye. Barack Obama was born in 1961. It seems to me that somewhere in between those birth years is a generational line that separates the people who had or heard debates over MLK and those who didn’t. Maybe not, maybe it’s down to people born after 1968, like YHB. But I think that difference will make a difference in how people view this election. Just a guess.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.